Position in chronology
CUSAS 31, 170
About this tablet
This is a small proto-cuneiform administrative tablet from the Uruk period, now broken into several pieces, recording quantities of commodities and livestock — a jar, some rams, and an unidentified stone or mineral item — allocated in connection with the city of Šuruppak and an official titled 'EN' (lord or high priest). It belongs to the earliest layer of writing in human history, when scribes used simple numeral-plus-sign notations to track goods moving through temple or palace institutions, well before writing could express full sentences.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving fragments of this very early accounting tablet list a series of goods and their quantities: one jar, three units of an unidentified stone or item, and two units credited to an official called the 'EN' (lord) of the city of Šuruppak. Later, after a broken section, the tablet records five male sheep (rams) and one unit of another item whose sign is not otherwise identifiable, followed by a category marker ('KIŠ') whose exact meaning is unclear. Much of the tablet is missing, so the full transaction — what was being counted, by whom, and for what purpose — cannot be reconstructed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Break — top edge missing) [...] [...] 1(N01) — jar (DUG) 3(N01) — NA-sign ... [x] 2(N01) — lord/EN of Šuruppak (Break) [...] IB-sign 5(N01) — male sheep/rams (UDUNITA) 1(N01) — ZATU676(b)-sign (Break) [...] KIŠ
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] [...] 1(N01) , DUG~a# 3(N01) , NA~a X 2(N01) , EN~a SZURUPPAK~a# [...] [...] IB~a 5(N01) , UDUNITA~a 1(N01) , ZATU676~b [...] KISZ#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Uruk III (ca. 3200-3000 BC)) — CUSAS 31, 170. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (P433200) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.